Too Much HappinessStories

Summary

Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.

With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

Too Much Happiness is a compelling, provocative—even daring—collection.

Contributor

Scott Esposito has written about books for almost ten years. His work has appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, and

11.17.09

Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness

2009 | Label: Random House Audio

Canada’s foremost storyteller once again demonstrates her tremendous gift
When Alice Munro preemptively withdrew herself from consideration for the Giller Prize — Canada’s biggest literary award — it was telling that no one called her out for hubris. Quite the opposite: critics lamented the fact that now she wouldn’t win her third Giller.

That kind of a reputation is hard to live up to, but with her latest collection, the 78-year-old Munro proves that Too Much Happiness deserves such high regard. Munro has always been known as an author who loves a shocking plot twist, and Too Much Happiness finds her pushing her characters harder than ever: two of these stories include triple-murders; there’s also cancer, adultery and a near-fatal fall. But though Munro is perhaps more gothic than ever in Too Much Happiness, that doesn’t mean she’s lost any of her trademark insight. “Dimensions,” featuring a husband who has murdered his three children, is a deep portrait of the wife who still needs him to help her confront the grief. “Fiction,” perhaps the lightest story in the collection, is the tale of a woman who finds she has become a character in a long-lost friend’s book. Her reaction to seeing her life portrayed by another is both utterly intriguing and true-to-life. That would be a good way to describe the majority of the work in Too Much Happiness — with it, Canada’s foremost storyteller has once again demonstrated her tremendous gift.

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